


Stillborn

by intrikate88



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Gen, Motherhood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-13
Updated: 2012-04-13
Packaged: 2017-11-03 14:58:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/382615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intrikate88/pseuds/intrikate88
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Regina will never be a mother; this is just one more thing Cora has taken from her. Spoilers to "The Stable Boy".</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stillborn

Regina will never bear a child.   
  
There are ways in any world, ways that women know, to stop this happening. Some good timing, herbs, a little pill every morning.    
  
It’s a quiet revenge against Cora, who would be the matriarch of kings.    
  
Regina would have had a family with Daniel. She would have borne him a son, who could ride horses maybe before he could walk, and who would have grown tall and strong until Regina had to look up at him, and he would have teased her for awhile about being his little mother. There would have been a daughter, a precious dark-haired girl even better at riding than her brother, sensitive like her father and stubborn like her mother. Regina would have fought the urge to make sure she didn’t become enamored with the village lout like all the other girls were, and she would have had many fretful conversations with Daniel before he reminded her that their daughter was so smart, so stubborn, that she wouldn’t have the patience for dealing with a man who was that patronizing. And their son, one day, would have escorted their daughter home one day, frightful in her disdain for that man who had seemed so attractive until he had tried to cheat in order to beat her at archery.    
  
There would have been other children, to watch grow up and become men and women Regina would be fiercely proud of. They would marry people that at first she would be suspicious of, but she had to let her children make their own decisions, even when she thought they were mistakes. But she had raised her children to have strong, trustworthy hearts, that found the good without being blinded by status or wealth.   
  
Daniel is dead, and Regina will never bear a child. Cora took that family she would have had from her, and she will not have her mother’s desired princelings.    
  
But Snow White looks like the daughter Regina will not have: dark hair, full lips, a round face, the tenacity to get back on her horse after the creature had bolted away with her. It is not just for Snow’s betrayal of a sacred promise that Regina hates her. Daily, the girl reminds her that she is Regina’s daughter, but not  her daughter. No, Cora had taken away that too: made the child her pet, and Snow confides in her as Regina had always known she would never be safe in doing. Regina had always known comfort would be found in her father’s arms; he would never step between her and her mother, but neither would he turn her words around to cut her like knives.   
  
Like a poisoned dagger stuck in her chest, the vibrance of Leopold’s child spreads as Regina herself bleeds life away. Snow is endlessly curious, exploring the castle for new hiding places, bothering the cook, pleading with the guards to teach her archery in the courtyard. Regina is hardly old enough to be her mother; she could have been like a sister, or an aunt perhaps: she would be the one claiming credit and blame when the two of them were found in the banquet hall with a sack of angry badgers, covered in poison ivy rashes, and doing their best to beat out a fire with a tapestry from the walls. Regina could have been Snow’s confidante, keeping secrets of her first infatuation, sneaking her out of the castle to see her friends, horseback rides in the woods in the night.    
  
In her imagination, Snow daydreams a little less and lives a little more; she doesn’t chatter about what she swore to conceal to whoever she encounters.    
  
Snow doesn’t know about how much a betrayed secret can destroy.   
  
So as she fades to a shadow of herself, Regina hates Snow for her innocence, that luxury Regina herself never had.   
  
And maybe, so many years later, it is still Cora’s ghost following her (they say a witch never truly dies) that keeps her from pushing a little at the magic binding Storybrooke, letting her body do that which it should be presenting an opportunity for each month. But none of her lovers are worthy of fathering her child; she has no wish to be married again, with a man who barely knows her defining how her life should go. But the dreams she still has of the children she and Daniel would have had still come, and with them, an ache. This little town never changes, and the mayor’s house will always be too quiet and empty, reminding her of all she destroyed for peace and autonomy.    
  
She ventures outside the world of Storybrooke. She works out deals, pays fees, fills out paperwork, tolerates Gold's sneers. She wants a closed adoption: if she is to be a mother, she will not let anyone rob her of her child, not ever again. Regina would destroy the woman who would take her child from her. (They say a witch never truly dies.)   
  
The boy is a newborn when he arrives in Regina’s arms. His mother, whoever she is, is not interested in ever being an issue. The child already has a patch of thick dark hair, like Daniel’s, like Regina’s. His tiny grip is already strong; she can imagine his hands growing, holding reins and calming skittish horses. His grandfather would have been so proud. Regina names her son Henry; it will never heal the hole in the world she created when she sacrificed her own father for this life, but-- he would have been so pleased with his grandson.   
  
She takes Henry home, rocks him to sleep, lays him in the crib she so carefully chose for him, and then she sits in the rocking chair to watch him sleep. His face wrinkles; it has not yet filled out with all the baby fat he will have, but those forehead wrinkles make him look like he is thinking too much about a worrisome world.    
  
It is then that Regina realizes two things: she has a  son . He is  hers . And that the peace, the love, the happiness she expected to grow within her when she had a child of her own is not there. She had expected love to grow like a briar rose around her heart, sharp and clinging and entirely impossible to remove.   
  
It is only at that point she begins to wonder if she has enough of a heart left for anything to cling to.   
  
Henry grows. He is endlessly curious about the world around him, much like Snow was; Regina buys him books, model planes, a computer, anything to keep him from running wild and discovering how blood runs under skin through scraping his knees. He is blind to the fact that he is getting older while all the children around him stay the same age; he only knows that he never holds onto friends for long, and he is lonely. He carries more thoughts than a boy his age should; he is secretive and quiet, much as Regina was at his age.   
  
It makes her angry, though she tries to hide it. She is a  good mother, who feeds him well and enrolls him in soccer and always picks him up when he gets sick at school. He has no reason to be a child like Regina, not when he has a mother who does not bind him with magic, does not strip him of all happiness, does not turn every interaction into a power play.   
  
(The irony does not escape her: where once she resented Snow’s innocence, she now resents Henry’s precocious solemnity. Though neither of them earned the right to those personalities. Not in the way Regina had been forced to.)   
  
Of course she loves him. Of course she must. Because she never put him in the curse, like everyone else. He’s free. He can leave, he can follow his dreams,  he can be himself . So she pushes him. She makes sure homework gets done, that projects are perfect. He will take advanced classes when he is older. And then he will apply to universities, and he will get into the best one. Yes, it’s pushy and strict; maybe more than his peers’ parents. But they are cursed. They will never leave.    
  
Henry is the only free person in Storybrooke, and she thinks that at the very least, she loves him for that breath of fresh air, one that doesn’t stink with the ghosts of the past. The ghost of a mother who had to control everything.   
  
Regina starts taking Henry to therapy, after he calls her evil, and says that he hates her. That she doesn’t love him, she just loves telling him what to do like she likes telling everyone in town what to do.   
  
Then she sits in Dr. Hopper’s waiting room, and doesn’t let any of the tears in her eyes fall. She knows what she is, what she has done. But Henry doesn’t. Henry should be a child, free, dreaming of adventures and happiness. He should only know of her as Mom, not as the Evil Queen everyone decided she was and she lived up to.    
  
But she is the Evil Queen. She is the woman who murdered her husband, her father, who cursed an entire world to unhappiness under her control just to try to reclaim some of what had been taken from her.   
  
They say that witches never truly die. And Henry squirms in her tight grasp just as she did in her own mother’s. Every fight against the world and her own womb has not kept her from being a mother in the only way she’s ever known.   
  
Henry emerges from Dr. Hopper’s room. “How was it, Henry?” she asks him, and she can tell he is lying when he shrugs and says that it was fine.   
  
“Are you okay?” he asks her. “Your eyes are red.”   
  
“I’m fine,” says Regina. “I’ve never been better.”


End file.
